"Biography" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been many reprints of Cook's Voyages, and many translations. The best Biography of Cook is that of Kitson, 1907. Besant's brief Life ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... told in the autobiographical passages of his writings which he himself addressed to his readers from time to time, and in the series of "Note Books," not meant for publication but included in his posthumous works; the remainder is chiefly contained in the family biography, "Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife" by his son Julian Hawthorne, "Memories of Hawthorne" by his daughter, Mrs. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, and "A Study of Hawthorne," by his son-in-law, George Parsons Lathrop. Collateral material is also to be found abundantly ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... had been on the verge of turning over to the college a great deal of interesting data regarding Brooke Hamilton which was private family history. Doctor Burns, then president of Hamilton, was to write the biography of the lovable founder of our college. After the falling-out with the Board member she refused to give up the data. Since then she has ignored the college. Brooke Hamilton's biography yet remains ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... marked the third jubilee of the Battle of the Plains. One of them, Edward Salmon's General Wolfe, devotes more than the usual perfunctory attention to the important influence of sea-power; but it is a sketch rather than a complete biography, and it is by no means free from error. The other is The Life and Letters of James Wolfe by ...
— The Winning of Canada: A Chronicle of Wolf • William Wood
... wrote a charming sketch of Chopin's life and art (F. Chopin, par F. Liszt, Paris, 1851), and a very appreciative though somewhat eccentric analysis of his work appeared anonymously in 1842 (An Essay on the Works of Frederic Chopin, London). The standard biography is the English work of Professor F. Niecks (Novello, 1888). See also W.H. Hadow, Studies in Modern Music, second series (1908). The editions of Chopin's works by his pupil Mikuli and by Klindworth are full of valuable elucidation as to methods of performance, but unfortunately ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... the same with Boccaccio. For two centuries, when but little was known of the Decameron north of the Alps, he was famous all over Europe simply on account of his Latin compilations on mythology, geography, and biography. One of these, de Genealogia Deorum, contains in the fourteenth and fifteenth books a remarkable appendix, in which he discusses the position of the then youthful humanism with regard to the age. We must not be misled by his exclusive references to poesia, as closer observation shows ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... intellect? Concha put it to sleep forever. She never read another book of travel, of history, biography, memoirs, essays, poetry—romance she had never read, and although some novels came to California in time she never opened them. It was peace she wanted, not the growing mind and the roving imagination. She brought her conversation ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... not, now is the very time in God's providence when the biography of William Ellery Channing could best make its appearance. We have heard that a distinguished divine, of different speculative religious views from Dr. Channing, has recently said,—'Channing is greatly needed among us at this present ...
— Hymns, Songs, and Fables, for Young People • Eliza Lee Follen
... centralized in one little community where a community building would be erected which would be used as a school in daytime, a motion-picture house at night, and a church on Sunday. A community secretary would have his office here, and would have charge of a select little library of fiction, poetry, biography, and works of reference. The leading periodicals dealing with farm problems, sociology, and economics, as well as lighter subjects, would be on file. In connection with this building would be an assembly-room suitable for dances, social events, and theatricals, and equipped with ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... know Lincoln as he really was must read the biography by his friend and law-partner, W. H. Herndon. This book was imperatively needed to brush aside the rank growth of myth and legend which was threatening to hide the real lineaments of Lincoln from the eyes of posterity.... There is no doubt about the ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... evening he read "The City" bore evidence of the playwright's personality. The paintings and bric-a-brac, the books—mostly biography and letters—the tapestries which seemed to blend with the bowls of flowers and furniture of French design, the windows looking out on lawns, gardens, and a pond with swans upon it, the moonlight on the Cupids ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... him of a biography he had read of the famous Doctor Goldsmith, author of the "Vicar of Wakefield," who made a tour on the continent of Europe, paying his way with music evoked from ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... it was, a vague and inconclusive episode, like so many others in my life. So many, in fact, that as I look back at it all, if it were not just for Rosa and the children, the sum-total of life for me would be futility. When I read biography, and I have read a good deal of it, I reflect upon the achievements of men, their loves and hates, their steady ambitions hacking away at obstacles until victory is in sight and the guerdon won, or their glorious deaths in action and the fullness ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... and youth. It has been to me an unfailing as well as always accessible authority for that subsequent period of his life which I could only know in disconnected facts or his own fragmentary reminiscences. It is less true, indeed, to say that she has greatly helped me in writing this short biography than that without her help it ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... than the armour in the Tower, or than a captain or colonel of the Guards. A century back we should have slept the more soundly for the knowledge that Jack Sheppard was securely swinging in chains; but in these piping times of peace his biography has extracted from the pockets of the public more shillings than the subject of it himself ever 'nabbed' on the king's highway. It is both interesting and instructive to observe how directly the material improvements of science act upon the moral condition of the world. As ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... day, he had a kind of recognition;—and even, by good accident, can tell us of it in his own words: [Kutzen (citing some BIOGRAPHY of Benkendorf), ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... is shown by the wills of this period, many of which have been published in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... his Plays. But I can find no Shakespeare in 'Titus Andronicus'. Are we not certain what manner of man Shakespeare was from his Works (notwithstanding that critics are ever asserting their impersonality) —far more certain than if his biography had been written by one who knew him all his life, and sustained to him the most intimate relations? We know Shakespeare—or he CAN be known, if the requisite conditions are met, better, perhaps, than ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... This biography, though historically based, should not be considered factual. It is not that there was no such man — indeed there was, and other accounts indicate that Francis Marion is as deserving of praise as this account would indicate — or moreso. It is not that the events described did not take ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... competency for life. He bore his honours with the same meekness and humility which had distinguished him in the days of his obscurity. So gentle and patient, and withal so distinguished and successful a follower of science under difficulties, perhaps cannot be found in the entire history of biography. ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... expectations, and made George feel the whole business an effort and a weariness. Letty sat pale and silent in her corner, devoured with regrets that she had not put on a thicker veil to hide the ravages of the morning; while George turned over the pages of a political biography, and could not prevent his mind from falling back again and again into dark places of ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... as a biography of Sergeant York. It is but a story of the strength and the simplicity of a man—a young man—whom the nation has honored for what he has done, with something in it of those who went before and left him as a legacy the qualities of mind and heart that enabled him to fight his fight in the Forest ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... wit, while presenting such clear conceptions of characters and careers, and the whole so restrained within the bounds of good taste and harmonious proportion, as to have been even to this day regarded as forming a model for the ideal biography. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... divinely terrible, through the chaotic gulf of Human History, and everywhere burning, as with unquenchable fire, the false and death-worthy from the true and life-worthy; making all Human History, and the Biography of every man, a God's Cosmos in place of a Devil's Chaos. So is it, in the end; even so, to every man who is a man, and not a mutinous beast, and has eyes to see. To thee, caitiff, these things were and are, quite incredible; to us they are too awfully certain,—the Eternal ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... and changing plates in Paris at our Legation in the intervals of spying on our refugees there, in the time of Rojas? He will wash out that sacred truth in blood. In my blood! Why do you look annoyed? This is simply a bit of the biography of one of our great men. What do you think he will do to me? There is a certain convent wall round the corner of the Plaza, opposite the door of the Bull Ring. You know? Opposite the door with the inscription, Intrada de la Sombra.' Appropriate, perhaps! That's ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Mrs. Tyson says, there existed "a special sympathy,"[144] and she further refers to her father as "the warmest friend of that extraordinary man."[145] Her father had many of Banneker's manuscripts, from which he intended to compile a biography of his friend, but his unusually busy commercial life afforded him no leisure in which to carry out this much cherished plan. Mrs. Tyson's account, therefore, can be relied upon as coming directly from those who, personally ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... biography, the editors of The Mirror have selected one of the most interesting memoirs to be found in the rich treasury of British literature. As a simple, yet animated picture of natural genius, forcing its way through the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... of De Maistre's life I have drawn from a very meagre biography by his son, Count Rodolphe de Maistre, supplemented by two volumes of Lettres et Opuscules (Fourth edition. Paris: Vaton. 1865), and a volume of his Diplomatic Correspondence, edited by M. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... an order to the troops, which should find a place in every biography of this great soldier. The course pursued by many of the Federal commanders in Virginia had been merciless and atrocious beyond words. General Pope had ravaged the counties north of the Rappahannock, especially the county of Culpepper, in a manner ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... too, had thrown the limelight on Max Diestricht, who, though for quite a time the fashion in the social world, had, up to the present, been comparatively unknown to the average New Yorker. His own knowledge of Max Diestricht went deeper than the superficial biography furnished by the newspapers—the old Hollander had done more than one piece of exquisite jewelry work for him. The old fellow was a character that beggared description, eccentric to the point of extravagance, and deaf as a post; but, in craftmanship, a modern Cellini. ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... high valuation of the writers of the present day could hardly be made, but there is a much larger number than formerly whose work is acceptable. Members of college faculties, and others, produce annually numerous books of solid worth in science, history, biography, economics, and sociology. Volumes of recollections and reminiscences interesting to the student of the past appear, and much local and state history has been rescued from oblivion. Some theological books are written, ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... objection against it is, that the language, opus fuit, seems rather to imply that it was necessary to justify himself for writing it at all, by citing the examples of former distinguished writers of biography, as he had done in the foregoing introduction. But why would it have been unnecessary to apologize for writing the life of Agricola, if the times in which he lived had not been so unfriendly to virtue? Because then Agricola ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... the biography of an author whom we respect, and therefore have thought about, with contradictory feelings. We are excited at the thought of finding our conclusions reinforced, and apprehensive less the compact and definite figure which our imaginations have gradually shaped should become ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... Romanticists; Hasebrock, author of a volume of essays called "Truth and Dream," has been likened to the English Charles Lamb. Vosmaer is another eminent figure in Dutch literature; he wrote a "Life of Rembrandt" which is a masterpiece of biography. Kuenen, who died but ten years ago, was a biblical critic of European celebrity. But the list of contemporary Dutch writers is long and brilliant, and the time to speak critically ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... how he fought for me, up to the final rehearsal! And to this day, whenever I indulge in a prayer, you bet Vincent Bland has a paragraph all to himself in it! [Checking herself and coming to FARNCOMBE.] Oh, but— I needn't inflict quite so much of my biography on you, need I? [He rises.] Sorry. I merely wanted to tell you enough to show you— to ...
— The 'Mind the Paint' Girl - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... Family Library is another volume of pleasant biography; for, to speak the truth, the biographies, or biographetts of this series are the most agreeable reading of the day. The Lives are not of undue length, and anecdote and judicious remark are abundantly scattered along each of them. There are no dry details of "birth, parentage, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... a whole lot of history and biography," Freddie went on, "and I've thought about what I read and about what's going on around me. I tell you the world's full of cant. The people who get there don't act on what is always preached. The preaching isn't all lies—at least, I think not. But it ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... darkened and faded with age, and can seldom be more than half seen, being hung too high, or somehow or other inconvenient, on the whole, I question whether there is much use in looking at them. The truest test would be, for a man well read in English history and biography, and himself an observer of insight, to go through the series without knowing what personages they represented, and write beneath each the name which the portrait ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... inherited both the literary tastes and the opinions of her father, and she thought herself aggrieved when her husband seemed unwilling to confide his plans to her. Plutarch thus tells her story, his authority seeming to be a little biography which one of her sons by her first husband afterwards wrote of his step-father. "She wounded herself in the thigh with a knife such as barbers use for cutting the nails. The wound was deep, the loss of blood great, and the pain and ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... regarding Abraham (Hist. Bible I, 73, 74, 79-81, 84-87, 90-92). Are these stories to be regarded simply as chapters from the biography of the early ancestor of the Hebrews or, like the story of the Garden of Eden, do they have a deeper, a more universal moral and religious significance? Back of the story of Abraham's call and settlement in Canaan clearly lies the historic ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... In writing a biography, the relative value of days and years should hold. There are days which count in space for years, and years for days. I spent the time on the whole happily with this Dutchman, whose name was Hans Koppel. He talked merrily save when he spoke of the war against ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Biography is a telescope of life, through which we can see the extremes and excesses of the varied properties of the human heart. Wisdom and folly, refinement and vulgarity, love and hatred, tenderness and cruelty, happiness ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... "Love—or a Name," are the novels which I have written since my return; and I also published a biography, "Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife." I cannot conscientiously say that I have found the literary profession—in and for itself—entirely agreeable. Almost everything that I have written has been written from necessity; and there is very little of it that I shall not be glad to see ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... recognised her window as an adaptation of Fra Angelico's picture, and he told her how the saint had wandered from monastery to monastery painting pictures on the walls. More he could not tell her, but he promised to procure a small biography of the saint. She received the book a few days after, and as she turned over the leaves she heard the children coming home from school, and she took the book out to them, for her sight was failing, and they read bits of it aloud, and she frightened them by dropping on her knees and crying ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... educated at the public school at Ruthin, and later at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he was sent when sixteen years of age. While at the university he appears to have indulged in a somewhat reckless expenditure, and Bishop Hacket, who wrote his biography, informs us that 'from a youth and so upward he had not a fist to hold money, for he did not lay out, but scatter, spending all that he had, and somewhat for which he could be trusted.' He was, however, by no means neglectful of his studies, for we are told ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... a bookcase in the room; I saw from the backs of the books, that they were about evidence, criminal law, criminal biography, trials, acts of Parliament, and such things. The furniture was all very solid and good, like his watch-chain. It had an official look, however, and there was nothing merely ornamental to be seen. In a corner was a little table of papers with a shaded lamp: so that he seemed to bring ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... account of his life to be prepared. A wish even, that was uttered at such a time, would have had the weight of a command; and from that day to this pious affection has carried out in the spirit as well as to the letter the desire of the dying man. No biography of Cooper has, in consequence, ever appeared. Nor is it unjust to say that the sketches of his career, which are found either in magazines or cyclopaedias, are not only unsatisfactory on account of their incompleteness, ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... the character of the individual in the circumstances of life, his conduct under those circumstances and the consequences which they ultimately produce, is the peculiar province of biography. Little therefore remains to be added. The benevolent temper, the filial piety and the maternal tenderness of Mrs. Robinson are exemplified in the preceding pages, as her genius, her talents, the fertility of her imagination, and the ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... tale from Mr. Mill's biography only brings into more striking relief the resource of the minister in all emergencies. "One day a very respectable gentleman entered the house of a tailor in Channerwick, and ordered a suit of clothes to be made out of cloth which he brought with him. The tailor's delight ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... an enthusiastic protagonist of militant Protestantism. / The chief protagonist on the company's side in the latest railway strike, Mr ——. / It was a happy thought that placed in the hands of the son of one of the great protagonists of Evolution the materials for the biography of another. / But most of the protagonists of this demand have shifted their ground. / As for what the medium himself or his protagonists may think of them—for etymological purposes that is ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... others had, but it never satisfied me, and I even then saw errors throughout the whole, and this strengthened my first impressions, and tended to mature the after-thought in me, that something wanted doing and must be done. It is not my intention in this introductory chapter to write an auto-biography; but my object is simply to show, how one impression followed another in my case, and what led to it; to point out briefly the various plans and inventions I had recourse to in carrying out my views and intentions; and, finally, to allude to their propagation through the country personally by ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... the dry sum of a charming Court biography, which first appeared in a periodical published in 1829, in Silesia, and which has been twice republished in a separate form—once (in 1838) at Brieg, under the title of "Passages from the Life of Dorothea Sibylla, Duchess of Liegnitz and Brieg." It purports to consist of extracts from ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... could head the game that his master was pursuing and turn it back; and he would guard any object he was desired to "watch" with unflinching constancy. But it would occupy too much space and time to enumerate all Crusoe's qualities and powers. His biography will unfold them. ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... desk was writing my biography, the detective—or rather the interpreter, as I prefer to think of him, because he spoke such perfect English—cross-examined me in his own way. As the grilling went on I did not know whether to be anxious about the future or to glow with pride over ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... it must be; it comes into manifestation like an eternal law of nature. Just as a chemical substance can only behave in a certain definite way, so a Buddha or a Christ can only live in a certain definite way. His life is not described merely by writing a casual biography; it is much better described by giving the typical features which are contained for all time in the wisdom of the Mysteries. The Buddha legend is no more a biography in the ordinary sense than the Gospels are meant to be a biography ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... opposition, and stands by him with exemplary usefulness and fidelity. But, though he is often pressed, he never contests a constituency, feeling, perhaps, that it is impossible to serve both Society and the Caucus. In time his name becomes the common property of all Society journals—his biography is published in one, his discreet service is extolled in another, while a third goes so far as to hint that, if the truth were known, it would be found that the various departments of the State ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various
... out of nearly five hundred pages gives only one to a discussion of the edition of Dryden, and half a page to an account of the establishment of the Quarterly Review. Gilfillan characterizes the critical work in almost as short a space, but with a good deal of judgment. The German biography of Scott contemporary with these, by Dr. Felix Eberty, is concerned with the man rather than his works. Of later Lives of Scott, Prof. Saintsbury's gives, in proportion to its length, more space than any other to Scott's critical work, but the book has ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... weaker neighbours, by means of gangs of robbers. The man who does this, becomes the slave of his gangs, as the imperial robber, who seizes upon smaller states by means of his victorious armies, becomes their slave, and, ultimately, their victim, The history of India is nothing more than the biography of such men, and the Rajah has read ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... find listed in our catalogue books on every topic: Poetry, Fiction, Romance, Travel, Adventure, Humor, Science, History, Religion, Biography, Drama, etc., besides Dictionaries and Manuals, Bibles, Recitation and Hand Books, Sets, Octavos, Presentation Books and Juvenile and Nursery Literature in ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... perhaps imagine that the value of biography depends upon the judgment and taste of the biographer; but on the contrary it may be maintained, that the merits of a biographer are inversely as the extent of his intellectual powers and of his literary talents. A plain unvarnished tale is preferable to the most highly ornamented narrative. ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... almost everywhere, although years had passed away since James Evans had entered into his rest. "He being dead yet speaketh." To write about him and his work is a labour of love. Would that the pen of some ready writer might give us a biography of this Missionary of such versatility of gifts, and such marvellous success ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... sum of the biographies of a few strong men." Much that is of profound and abiding interest in American history during the two decades immediately preceding our Civil War is bound up in the biography of the strong man of whom I write. Chief among the actors, his place was near the middle of the stage during that ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... Edition.—Embracing the whole of his $2.00 writings, with a Biography of the author, and profusely illustrated ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... organizer and driller of fleets, and patient in effort to obtain advantage before attacking, exhibited on occasion headlong, though not inconsiderate, audacity, and also tenacious endurance in fight. Still, it will probably be admitted by the student of naval biography that to him Hawke suggests primarily the unhesitating sudden rush—the swoop—upon the prey, while Rodney resembles rather the patient astute watcher, carefully keeping his own powers in hand, and waiting ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... and valuable work, as to which your correspondent inquires, was written by Wm. Paterson, the projector of the Bank of England and the Darien scheme; a great and memorable name, but which, to the discredit of British biography, will be sought for in vain in Chalmers's or our other biographical dictionaries. The book above noticed appears to be a continuation of another tract by the same author, entitled An Inquiry into the Reasonableness and Consequences of an Union with ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... this friendship and its results are too well known to require more than a passing mention. Miss Klumpke is now established in Paris, and writes me that, in addition to her painting, she is writing of Rosa Bonheur. She says: "This biography consists of reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur's life, her impressions of Nature, God, and Art, with perhaps a short sketch of how I became acquainted with the illustrious woman whose precious ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... Johnson's Life of Savage in this volume has not less interest than the Lives of Addison and Swift, between which it is set, although Savage himself has no right at all to be remembered in such company. Johnson published this piece of biography when his age was thirty-five; his other lives of poets appeared when that age was about doubled. He was very poor when the Life of Savage was written for Cave. Soon after its publication, we are told, ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... NEW YORK.—Being personal incidents, interesting sketches, bits of biography, and gossipy events in the life of nearly every leading merchant in New York City. Three ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... have a greyish-white speculum, which becomes pure white at an earlier age than that at which the adult male acquires his other and more strongly-marked sexual differences: see Audubon, 'Ornithological Biography,' vol. iii. 1835, pp. 249-250.) Between such extreme cases of close sexual resemblance and wide dissimilarity, as those of the Crossoptilon and peacock, many intermediate ones could be given, in which the characters follow our two rules in ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... was begun with no hope or intention of making a formal and finished biography, but only to place on record some of my brother's sayings and doings, to fix scenes and memories before they suffered from any dim obliteration of time, to catch, if I could, for my own comfort and delight, the tone and sense of that vivid and animated atmosphere which ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Education" also takes up the great composers separately and gives most thorough-going courses on them. The Beethoven course, for example, is arranged in twelve lessons. The course furnishes the student with the Beethoven biography by Crowest; with twelve "lesson pamphlets," each pamphlet relating to a division of the course and written by Thomas Whitney Surette; with twelve scores, orchestral and pianoforte; and sixty-two "educational" music rolls. The scores ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... despised it—unreasonably. A real thing done, he said, was better than a thousand books. Nobody read books, he said, but women, parsons and idle people. But there must be books. And I want one. Something a little more real than the ordinary official biography.... I have thought of young Leighton, the secretary of the Commission. He seems thoroughly intelligent and sympathetic and really anxious to reconcile Richmond's views with those of the big business men on the Committee. ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... son of Luca Neroni, painter, sculptor, goldsmith, and engraver, about whom, owing either to the scarcity of his works or the scandal of his end, Vasari has but a few words in another man's biography, must have been born shortly before or shortly after the year 1450, a contemporary of Perugino, of Ghirlandaio, of Filippino Lippi, and of Signorelli, by all of whom he was influenced at various moments, and whom he ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... is more or less of a mystery to other men, and one who would write it effectively must have been intimate with him from his youth onward. When the biography is that of a man of genius, the difficulty is greatly increased, even to the writer who has been his life-long familiar; for genius, by the necessity of its being, implies a departure in a variety of ways from the thoughts and rules ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... which paints in fascinating colors the various phases of unrepented vice and crime, without the redeeming shadows of honor and Christian morality, our little volume must fall a welcome sunbeam. The strange career of our heroine constitutes a sensational biography charming and beautiful ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... his country-house,—bow, arrows, wings, and all complete. A visitor, indigenous to the region, looking pensively at the figure, asked the lady of the house "if that was a statoo of her deceased infant?" What a delicious, though somewhat voluminous biography, social, educational, and aesthetic in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the biography which pieced itself unconsciously together as he talked needs a sprinkle of salt here and there, but it all had the earmarks of veracity. He was a Briton, once a surgeon in the British army, with ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... from inexperience in literary work of such length, that I engaged to write the biography which I now present to the public. But the diaries and letters placed in my hands lightened the work of composition, and it has been a labor of affection as well as of duty to pay what tribute I might to the memory of two of the noblest ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... conscientious and ill-paid work; he wrote articles for encyclopaedias, dictionaries of biography and natural science, doing just enough to enable him to live while he followed his own bent, and neither more nor less. He had a piece of imaginative work on hand, undertaken solely for the sake of studying the resources of language, an important psychological ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... the men, women, children and four footed live stock of MacLeod's Settlement upon a printed page and still have room left for a brief biography of each. They all came, all dressed in their best holiday raiment, all happy and eager for the celebration. From far down the Little MacLeod river men trod the slushy trails, rough fellows for the most part and ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... incomplete. Carlyle, who gave a hasty glance at it in his life of Frederick, declared that he could find nothing but 'mere inanity and darkness visible'; and since Carlyle's day the progress has been small. A short chapter in Desnoiresterres' long Biography and an essay by Churton Collins did something to co-ordinate the few known facts. Another step was taken a few years ago with the publication of M. Lanson's elaborate and exhaustive edition of the Lettres Philosophiques, the work in which Voltaire gave to ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... The biography of the robins was finished just as Dr. Weston came in to announce to Mary Louise and Josie that they had been elected to the board of governors of the Children's ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... youth had reached the goal which the boy of eight had dimly seen. And now, if you would learn how he worked and taught in a country school in order to earn the money to spend two years in college, and how the young man became one of the most eminent preachers in America, you must read a complete biography of Theodore Parker, the hero of ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... Thornycrofts'. The head of the household, being detained in the City, did not appear; and Mrs. Thornycroft's tongue, unchecked by her husband's presence, and excited by the event of the afternoon, galloped on at a fearful rapidity. She poured out upon the luckless young man all the baby biography of her family, from Missy's christening down to the infant Selina's cutting of her first tooth. To all of which he listened with a praiseworthy attention, giving at least silence, which was doubtless all the ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... Jerrold's Biography is still unwritten. The work is in the hands of his eldest son,—his successor in the editorship of "Lloyd's,"—and will be done with pious carefulness. Meanwhile I cannot do more than sketch the narrative of his life; but so much, at all events, is necessary as shall enable the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... shameful time of the spying by the agitators had begun, when so many young men who had deserved well of their country, like Ernst Moriz, Arndt, and Jahn, distinguished and honourable scholars like Welcker, suffered severely under these odious persecutions. One must have read the biography of the honest and laborious Germanist Wackernagel to be able to credit the fact that that quiet searcher after knowledge was pursued far into middle life by the most bitter persecution and rancorous injuries, because as a schoolboy—whether ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of long-indulged modes of thought and action, notwithstanding all the depressing effect of frequent attempts and frequent failures, we may break ourselves off from all that is sinful in our past lives, and begin afresh, saying, 'God helping me! I will write another sort of biography for myself for the days ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... commonly precedes a biography, the curious reader may wish to be told what this "Bestia audax," who so greatly ruffles the tempers of our eclectics, is like. Here, at starting, is a serious chameleon-like difficulty, for the bookworm offers to us, if we are guided by their words, as many ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... the article consecrated to Martial de Sairmeuse in the "General Biography of the Men of the Century," give the history of his ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... of paper marks; almost every title-page was covered with minute writing, which, when examined, proved to contain a record of lectures, or conversations with the author of the volume, sometimes a string of anecdotes or a short biography, rapidly sketched out of the fulness of personal knowledge, and often seasoned with a subtle causticity and wit. A history of modern thinking Germany, of that 'unextinguished hearth' whence the mind of Europe has been kindled for three generations, might almost have been evolved ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in this edition won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Literature in the "Biography or Autobiography" category. As such, every attempt has been made to reproduce it exactly as it was printed and as it won the award. In particular, inconsistent hyphenation of compound words is pervasive in this text and has been retained. Unconventional punctuation—for ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... belongs to the Stuart period in everything but its theme. Nor at any later period is there the same wealth of material for such a collection as is given in this volume. The eighteenth century devoted itself rather to biography. When the facts of a man's life, his works, and his opinions claimed detailed treatment, the fashion of ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... He mounted, and turning towards the house muttered: "A little more of this, and good-bye to my nerves! But it's pleasant to have the taste of it in my mouth for a minute. How would it look in Roadmaster's biography, that a girl just out of school brought the rain to his eyes?" He laughed a little bitterly, and then went on: "Poor Barbara! She mustn't know while I'm alive. Stretch out, my nag; we've a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the narrative of his life to give some account of his religious beliefs, and we will follow his example. And first of all let us say frankly that Parton, whose work is likely long to remain the standard biography of Franklin, gives a false color to the religious experience of his hero. Of regeneration there is in Franklin no sign, but instead of that a constant growth,—which is far more wholesome. He was always an amused and skeptical observer of ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... executed in the manner of a dictionary, running in alphabetical order. The first volume extends to the letter I, and is illustrated with scraps from newspapers, and a few portraits. It is written pretty fully in double columns. The portrait and biography of Bouzard form an admirable specimen of biographical literary memoirs. The second volume goes to Z. The third volume is entitled "Les trois Siecles palinodiques, ou Histoire Generale des Palinods de Rouen, Dieppe, &c.—by ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the Italian patriot. In his life time he had been despised and rejected, but he was now dead; his biography a well-written one was in all the circulating libraries, and even those who were far from agreeing with his political views, had learned something of the nobility of his character. So there was both surprise and envy in Lady Caroline's tone; she had ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... of the title-page biography tells us little; but it may be well, before speaking of his book, to bring that little together. He was a Swiss Protestant of French extraction, born at Geneva in 1702. His Christian names were Jean-Andre; and he had come to England from his native land towards the close ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... that every man's biography is at his own expense. He furnishes not only the facts, but the report. I mean that all biography is autobiography. It is only what he tells of himself that comes ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... from the army, I started to write literary criticism, and in 1951 I published a critical biography of Anderson. It came shortly after Lionel Trilling's influential essay attacking Anderson, an attack from which Anderson's reputation would never quite recover. Trilling charged Anderson with indulging a vaporous sentimentalism, a ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... annoyed by the applications of artists and literary men, the former for him to give them sittings for his portrait, and the latter for materials for either his biography, or a general history of the Revolution. He positively refused compliance with the latter request, but occasionally indulged the former. At the solicitation of Francis Hopkinson, he sat to Robert Edge Pine, a diminutive Englishman and excellent artist. Pine was a warm republican, and came to America ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... volumes of this series of English Men of Letters, and in other works of a similar nature which have appeared lately as to the Ancient Classics and Foreign Classics, biography has naturally been, if not the leading, at any rate a considerable element. The desire is common to all readers to know not only what a great writer has written, but also of what nature has been the man who has produced such great work. As to all the authors taken in hand before, there has been ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... desire to have the literary biography of this country ably executed, and proposed to Dr. Johnson to undertake it. Johnson signified his readiness to comply with his ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... frightened the club at Medenham, that he had been in the Inquisition at Valladolid—that under the name of D. Riz, as he called it, he had known the lovely Queen of Scots—was a LITTLE too much. "Sir," then I said, "you were speaking about a Miss Bechamel. I really have not time to hear all of your biography." ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Chinese, Lao Tzu was an older contemporary of Confucius; recent Chinese and Western research (A. Waley; H. H. Dubs) has contested this view and places Lao Tzu in the latter part of the fourth century B.C., or even later. Virtually nothing at all is known about his life; the oldest biography of Lao Tzu, written about 100 B.C., says that he lived as an official at the ruler's court and, one day, became tired of the life of an official and withdrew from the capital to his estate, where he died ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... following the future, it will be well to look back. Lord John himself must play so large a part in a biography of his wife that a sketch of his life up to this point, and some reminders of the kind of man he was, may interest the reader; not a review of his political achievements, but an outline of the events which had left him at his second marriage ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... enjoyed the advantage of an intimate personal acquaintance with Washington, who was one of his most steadfast political supporters, and whose able biography shows a thorough appreciation of his extraordinary abilities and virtues, gives the following summary view ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... An admirer of Shelley's works, Clemens could not resist taking up the defense of Shelley's abandoned wife. It had become the fashion to refer to her slightingly, and to suggest that she had not been without blame for Shelley's behavior. A Shelley biography by Professor Dowden, Clemens had found particularly irritating. In the midst of his tangle of the previous year he had paused to give it attention. There were times when Mark Twain wrote without much sequence, digressing this way ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... particularly wish to render fullest acknowledgment did she not desire to escape all publicity and forbid me to give her name in print. I am indebted to Sir William Robertson Nicoll without whose kindly and active intervention I should never have taken active steps to obtain the material to which this biography owes its principal value. I am under great obligations to Mr. Herbert Jenkins, the publisher, in that, although the author of a successful biography of Borrow, he has, with rare kindliness, brought me into communication with Mr. Wilfrid J. Bowring, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... Talk", 12th Sept. 1831, and 26th June 1834). Coleridge, in his letters, has written his own life, for his life, after all, was a life of thought, and his finest thoughts and his most ambitious aspirations are given expression to in his letters to his numerous friends; and the true biography of Coleridge is that in which his letters are made the main source of the narrative. A Biographia Epistolaris is what we ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... tails of copper-tinged brown hair down her back, and was perhaps the busiest bee in the household hive, by reason of the manifold studies, health exercises and recreations she had to attend to, she secretly, and of her own motion, and out of love, added another task to her labors—the writing of a biography of me. She did this work in her bedroom at night, and kept her record hidden. After a little, the mother discovered it and filched it, and let me see it; then told Susy what she had done, and how pleased I was, and how proud. I remember that time with a deep ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... leaning back and lighting a cigarette, "is better than the newspapers. Go on, Colonel! Your biography may not be sympathetic, but it ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... retirement of a note I fear that I shall offend the dignity of history, and of biography, by printing the lines in which this intention was announced to me. They were written "in character;" and the character was that of the "waterman" at the Charing-cross cabstand, first discovered by George Cattermole, whose imitations ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... first pipe. Hone, in the first volume of the "Every Day Book" tells how he and some friends visited this Pied Bull, then in a very decayed condition, and smoked their pipes in the dining-room in memory of Sir Walter. From the recently published biography of William Hone by Mr. F.W. Hackwood, we learn that the jovial party consisted of William Hone, George Cruikshank, Joseph Goodyear, and David Sage, who jointly signed a humorous memorandum of their proceedings on the occasion, from which it appears that "each of us smoked a pipe, that is to ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... under conditions," external circumstances and influences count little. The Great Man is supreme. He is not the creature of his age, but its creator; not its servant, but its master. "The History of the World is but the Biography of Great Men." ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... question mainly of a psychological sort, to be answered by discovering and delineating the peculiar nature of the poet from his poetry, as is usual with the best of our own critics at present: [Footnote: A striking example of this method, the blending of criticism with biography, is to be found in Carlyle's own Essay on Burns. The significance of the method, in such hands as those of Carlyle, is that it lays stress on the reality, the living force, of the poetry with which it deals. It was the ...
— English literary criticism • Various |
